New Books in Latin American Studies

Alberto Harambour's new book Soberanías Fronterizas. Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1840s-1920s) (Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019) examines the explosion of foreign-owned sheep farming, the fitful expansion of Argentine and Chilean sovereignty, and the violence of primitive accumulation and genocide in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Soberanías Fronterizas wrestles with the multiple and competing sovereignties articulated during the Age of Empire, Latin America’s export boom, and the dispossession of autonomous indigenous peoples through settler colonialism. It asks how, over the course of less than a century, this vast territory described by Europeans and outsiders as inhospitable, unknowable, and uninhabited, came to be a wildly profitable export enclave.Harambous uncovers how foreign (predominantly British) capital came into possession of millions of hectares of land for sheep raising, effectively establishing sovereign control at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants, Chile, and Argentina. To do this, he reconstructs how foreign investors, merchants, and elites and politicians in Santiago and Buenos Aires built networks of corruption to facilitate land acquisitions, infrastructural improvements, and immigration of labourers. This process, however, was anything but smooth. It came through violence (extermination of Fueginos such as the Selknam, extreme military repression of labour movements, and sheep latifundista resistance to customs).Jesse Zarley is assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where he teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and Global History. His research interests include the Mapuche, borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of revolution, particularly in Chile and Río de la Plata. Heis the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.” Edgar Garcia is one such historian…and if you’re not yet convinced of Benjamin’s dictum, you should listen to this interview.In Signs of the America: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Garcia sets sparks flying by inviting us to explore the literature and theory created by 20th and 21st century writers who deploy sign systems that, according to the creation myth of European hegemony, alphabetized thought supposedly superseded and destroyed. Akin to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in ambition and originality, Signs of the Americas not only pries open a fascinating archive but also forces us to question the organizational principles that govern intellectual history and cultural criticism in this hemisphere. In this interview, we discuss work by Jaime de Angulo, Cecilia Vicuña, John Borrows, and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Garcia’s own Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), which serves as a kind of poetic companion to Signs.David Gutherz is a Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research deals with the history of the human sciences, with a special interest in how intellectuals have aided and undermined authoritarian movements. You can find out more about his work at www.davidmaxgutherz.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Romeo Guzman's and his colleague's East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers University Press, 2020) is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history.East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives-stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labour organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Cristina Soriano examines the links between the spread of radical ideas, literacy, and the circulation of information in a society without a printing press. In doing so, Soriano shows the ways Caribbean revolutionary ideas flowed into the ports and coastal communities across colonial Venezuela. The Haitian Revolution was front and centre of these revolutionary ideas, which inspired many and terrified others. Through these information networks, creole, pardo, and even enslaved people engaged in ideas about republicanism, abolitionism, and racial egalitarianism. This book offers insight into the later chaotic and multidirectional process of the anti-colonial movement in early nineteenth-century Venezuela.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book discusses the complexities of navigating, negotiating, and interpreting informal and formal justice processes, as participated in and experienced by protagonists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries.Jeff Bachman is a senior lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of the United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the relationship and editor of the volume cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019), Ana María Reyes examines the ways Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic Marta Traba railed against international forms of modernism and promoted low brow or even provincial forms of art in the period of the Colombian National Front’s coalition government (1958-1974). In doing so, Reyes situates art in a pivotal moment in Colombian history where efforts to end political violence through compromise and power-sharing also led to the ushering of modernizing projects promoted initially under President Alberto Lleras Camargo. Reyes shows that art became under the purview of elites seeking to project Colombia as a modern, internationalist nation. González, on the other hand, increasingly questioned and challenged elite efforts to present modernism as the epitome of high art and culture in Colombia. In doing so, Reyes wholeheartedly adopted her role as a provocateur as a way to resist U.S. cultural interference and to preserve the marginal voices so often derided by urban elites in Bogotá. Through an examination of art, Reyes offers a refreshing perspective on the ways taste became politicized in mid-twentieth century Colombia.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Tanya Harmer’s new biography, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how a young Chilean woman pursued her political commitments and navigated patriarchal strictures as a militant leftist. The daughter of Salvador Allende, Beatriz Allende was born in 1942 and came of age in a tumultuous period of Chilean history. As a young woman, she participated in youth and party politics in Chile but was also deeply connected to continental revolutionary struggles, particularly in Cuba. Though her politics diverged from her father’s, she was also a key adviser for Allende. After going into exile following the 1973 coup that brought down Allende’s government, Beatriz Allende built solidarity networks from Cuba, where she also was raising two children. Beatriz Allende took her own life in 1977.Harmer’s book traces how Beatriz’s political consciousness changed over time, paying particular attention to the ways in which gendered expectations of her shaped the nature of her militancy. In this conversation, Harmer also discusses the key, exclusive sources she used to write this biography. Beatriz Allende’s life reveals underexplored dimensions of Latin American political movements, especially those on the left, connecting that history to the themes of youth culture, gender, and everyday life in Cold War Latin America.Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about youth, higher education, transnationalism, and social class in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 1833 Cholera epidemic that devastated independent Mexico as his his point of departure, this is not primarily a medical history.Beginning with the suggestion of a contemporary observer that the epidemic put Mexicans on their best, or at least most religiously fervent behavior, Stevens asks how we might be able to measure everyday piety during a time of transition and crisis. His answer comes from following archival trails within parish records, novels, and memoirs and offers readers a glimpse of intimate urban life. In so doing, his book brings to life the day to day practices of Mexicans from birth and naming practices to death and burial norms and shows a country coming to terms with its independence. Students and scholars alike will enjoy following vibrant historical figures like fifteen-year-old Concha, navigating potential suitors with the help of parents and priests as well as unraveling the mystery of why a US-born bootmaker was murdered in Mexico City during a religious progression.Donald Stevens is an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and an assistant editor for the journal the Americas. He is the author of Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico by Duke University Press and editor of, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies.Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady. She is a historian of 20th century Bolivia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. In this ethnography, Alexander L. Fattal explores the ways marketing became a tactic of counterinsurgency as a means of a humanitarian intervention, which has proven stunning and illusory. The work draws on archival research and extensive fieldwork with Colombian Ministry of Defense, former rebels, political exiles, and peace negotiators in Colombia, Sweden, and Cuba. Alex. Fattal is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies